Rhetoric and Composition/Comma Splice

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"Comma splice" is the term commonly used to describe two independent clauses (basically, clauses that express a complete thought and could stand on their own as full sentences) joined by a comma rather than other accepted punctuation approaches, such as a comma with a coordinating conjunction, a period, or a semi-colon. Like the run-on sentence, they may have a coordinating conjunction (and, or, nor, but, for, so yet) between them but not the comma that needs to accompany the coordinating conjunction when separating two independent clauses.